Toronto, Canada, March 16,
2003 Is Tony
Blair crazy, or just plain
stupid? By
ERIC MARGOLIS Contributing Foreign
Editor TONY Blair, Britain's
prime minister, proposed a "compromise"
last week to the deadlocked UN Security
Council: President Saddam Hussein
of Iraq should go on TV and admit he had
weapons of mass destruction and had
committed other transgressions. Blair's offer, reeking of mock
sincerity, was clearly crafted to dampen
down a storm of Labour party criticism
over his sycophantic support of
President George Bush's impending
crusade against the Saracens of Iraq. But
it was an offer Iraq was certain to
reject, thus ending diplomacy and opening
the way to war. Small wonder the French call Britain
"perfidious Albion." Blair's demarche was
high hypocrisy, even by Downing Street's
usual standard. Why doesn't the
insufferably sanctimonious Blair go on TV
and explain why Britain still retains
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons
in sizable quantities? Are they to stop a
cross-channel invasion by France or the
Vikings? Perhaps Blair could discuss Winston
Churchill's plan to use poison gas against
any German landing in World War II. More
to the point, Blair should explain why
Britain and the U.S. supplied Iraq with
germ warfare agents and many of its
chemical arms during the 1980s (confirmed
in U.S. Senate hearings). Or why British
government technicians, discovered by this
writer in Baghdad in 1990, were producing
anthrax and Q-fever germ weapons for
Iraq? Instead of harping on Iraq's brutality,
Blair might discuss Britain's savaging of
Ireland, brutal colonial conquest of
almost half the known world, the addiction
of millions of Chinese to British-grown
opium, and crimes in India, Africa and
Burma. And admit that some of today's
worst political problems - Iraq,
Palestine, Kashmir, India vs. Pakistan -
are due to British imperialism. Blair may well owe a political debt to
the financiers and press barons who
launched his meteoric political career and
badly want this war. But plunging Britons into an unjust,
unnecessary war to please these
neo-imperialists is intolerable. The only other explanation - that Blair
is doing all this out of conviction - is
even more frightening. Bad enough born-again George Bush
apparently believes he is commanded by God
to go to war. That his chief advisers on the Mideast
seem to want to recreate biblical
Israel. That many of Bush's core fundamentalist
supporters believe this war will hasten
the conversion of Jews to Christianity and
bring the world's end through
Armageddon. Blair is too intelligent to swallow
such claptrap. Every Iraqi "weapons of mass
destruction site" claimed by British and
U.S. intelligence has thus far turned out,
when inspected by the UN, to be clean. If Blair still
believes these clearly debunked claims,
he needs help. The CIA and MI.6 still
claim they know Iraq is still hiding
stores of nerve gas. So then, why not
give the locations to UN
inspectors? Iraq's feeble, 150-km range al-Samoud
missiles might have exceeded their
permitted range by an inconsequential
10-15 km. Big deal. They are being
destroyed. Worry instead about North
Korea's new Taepodong-II missile, which
the CIA says can deliver a nuclear warhead
to the United States. Unbelievably, Iraq-obsessed Bush
dismisses menacing North Korea as only a
"regional problem." Saddam's notorious "Winnebagos of
death" - germ-making trucks - turned out,
on inspection, to be mobile food testing
labs. Last week's U.S. and
British-promoted canard, Iraq's "drones of
death," were three rickety model airplanes
unworthy of World War I, rather than
dispensers of germs, as the Pentagon
claimed. Only one had managed to fly - all
of two miles. Iraq's only true potential weapon of
mass destruction, VX nerve gas, remains an
open question. But Iraq lacks any
offensive capability to deliver VX. Its sole use is as a defensive
battlefield weapon, CIA Director George
Tenet noted. Iraq's most important defector, Gen
Hussein Kamel, who headed its
biowarfare projects, stated he personally
supervised destruction of all of Iraq's
nerve gas in 1991, a fact not mentioned by
the White House. Other experts say any germ or gas
weapons held by Iraq have by now
deteriorated through age into inertness.
As for Bush's charge Saddam might give
such weapons to anti-American groups, why
didn't he do so from 1990 to 2003, when
the U.S. was daily bombing Iraq and trying
to overthrow his regime? Because he's not
suicidal. Unable to locate Iraq's
U.S./British-supplied weapons, unable to
link Iraq to Osama bin Laden, Bush
and Blair shifted gears. They now claim
Iraq's suffering people must be
"liberated." But why weren't they
liberated when Saddam committed his worst
rights violations during the 1980s, when
Iraq was a U.S./British ally? And what
about the startling revelation by the
former CIA Iraq desk chief that the
gassing death of 5,000 Kurds at Halabja;
an event endlessly reiterated by Bush -
may have been accidentally caused by Iran,
not Iraq? As fast as one lie is exposed, more pop
up. The U.S./British propaganda machine is
relentless. For Bush, the war against Iraq
will conveniently be both his re-election
campaign and culmination of biblical
prophesy. For the far
more worldly British leader, all we can
say is Blair, your pants are on
fire. What next in this laughable, pre-war
propaganda circus? Will Iraqis be accused
of smoking indoors or hiding lethal nail
clippers? - Eric can be reached
by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com
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